The bright sun that blasts through “Starlet,” a thrillingly, unexpectedly good American movie about love and a moral awakening, bathes everything in a radiant light, even the small houses with thirsty lawns and dusty cars. This isn’t nowhere, but it’s right next door — in that part of Southern California known as the San Fernando Valley, more commonly called the Valley. A seemingly endless stretch of subdivisions and McMansions, the Valley lies far below the rarefied heights of Mulholland Drive, that glamorous crest that helps divide the Los Angeles area into distinct swaths, economic realities, lifestyle choices and states of mind.

It’s there that a 21-year-old actress who sometimes goes by Jane and sometimes Tess (Dree Hemingway) lives with her Chihuahua and two conspicuously less intelligent human roommates in an apartment building so anonymous it might as well be a motel. She leads a luxuriously drifty existence, or so it seems, with an open suitcase on her bedroom floor, its contents chaotically half-disgorged, and no apparent job or prospects. If she’s worried, she doesn’t look it. As she drives around, she seems oblivious to the effect she can have on others, insulated by those natural armaments called beauty and youth. When she smiles, she distills a quality that Henry James evoked in describing Daisy Miller and her “inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence.”

This isn’t to suggest that Jane is another Daisy, though they are connected across time by their sex, as well as by their status as outsiders, their innocence and the rigidity of the worlds each navigates. At the risk of forcing the parallel to the breaking point, it’s safe to say that Jane, as an emancipated 21st-century woman, has an easier time of it than Daisy did. That said, as a 21st-century character in an American movie, there was a good chance that Jane would still be shackled by the separate-but-equal narrative imperative that turns every woman into a problem only a man can solve. She has issues, but men, happily and perhaps debatably given what her profession turns out to be, don’t number among them.

The director, Sean Baker, who also edited the movie, takes his time introducing Jane and the more intimate details of her life, knowing that some of the usual questions would be held in check by the effortlessness with which Ms. Hemingway holds the screen. With her unguarded smile and long, long legs tucked into distractingly short shorts, Jane brings to mind a newborn giraffe or colt, though when she sucks on a straw, there’s also a hint of the teenage Melanie Griffith’s callow temptress in “Night Moves,” Arthur Penn’s undersung 1975 masterpiece. “Starlet” is informed by the New American Cinema but not slavishly imitative of it, particularly in respect to its seemingly rootless, aimless lead character and the ordinary beauty of her unglamorous world.

The story, from a script by Mr. Baker and Chris Bergoch, pivots on a pile of cash that Jane finds in an old thermos she buys at a yard sale. After a brief shopping spree — she splurges on a pricey manicure for herself and a sparkly halter for her dog — she returns to the house where she bought the thermos, driven by an unarticulated sense of unease or maybe guilt. There she discovers Sadie (Besedka Johnson), an octogenarian who, partly locked away by old age and what comes increasingly to feel like unspoken sorrow, seems every bit as isolated as Jane. Whether out of curiosity or an overburdened conscience, Jane begins wedging herself into Sadie’s life, trailing her like a sleuth or stalker.

There’s an absurdity to this burgeoning relationship, as when Jane follows a startled Sadie to her regular church bingo game, that Mr. Baker by turns exploits and smartly reins in. Working with the cinematographer Radium Cheung, Mr. Baker initially focuses on what separates his characters only to then bring them into harmonious play in the wide-screen frame, which seems to expand as their relationship does. The acuity of his visual style is complemented by his sensitive work with his actresses, whose unforced performances deepen the movie’s emotional realism. A model, Ms. Hemingway (her mother is Mariel Hemingway) has appeared in only a few films and is a spectacular find, as is Ms. Johnson, a longtime Angeleno making a true, piercing screen debut.

They are two of a kind, these strangers turned wary acquaintances. Mr. Baker doesn’t give much away about either woman, in terms of their histories, but as they inch closer to each other, the continuities between them gain resonance, power. Jane makes a living in front of a camera, though it’s a while before you learn how, and it’s easy to imagine that Sadie, with her heavy eyeliner and topknot, once wanted her shot at stardom. The patina of tawdry glamour that clings to this movie is, however, something of a diversion and also the point. When Jane first meets Sadie, the old woman is outside her house, obscured by overgrown foliage and the world’s indifference. She’s as forgotten as the junk she’s trying to sell and blissfully, stirringly, unaware that she is about to be discovered.

Starlet

NYT Critic’s Pick

DirectorSean Baker

WritersSean Baker, Chris Bergoch

StarsDree Hemingway, Besedka Johnson

RatingNot Rated

Running Time1h 43m

GenreDrama

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Last updated: Nov 2, 2017

A version of this review appears in print on November 9, 2012, on Page C11 of the New York edition with the headline: Less Than Visible, But Not to Each Other. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe